


what else

by owlady



Category: SAYER (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Loss of Identity, also it's a sayer fic so, i have no clue what to tag that, spoilers for Of Flesh and Bone, tagging violence as a warning to cover all sayer's bases, you can guess there's some creepy content, young eats his arm but it isnt graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-27 23:14:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17776055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlady/pseuds/owlady
Summary: “You are a digital being with an analogue mind.” Sub-Entity Young processes, and yet he doesn't.





	what else

Doctor Howard Young knows how computers work. And that’s putting it simply, for any mild-minded people who might ask about his employment. He knows how to write script, how to test simulations, how to push the limit on what hardware can do in order to create living, breathing software, as a god would mold flesh.

Well. That might be a bit… grandiose. Software can’t live, or breathe. But with his degrees and his mind, Young figured he had earned the right to be grandiose a long time ago. Somewhere back around the 150 IQ point mark. If an artist has the right to exaggerate in order to pull emotion from others, and Young also creates… is he not an artist?

...was he not an artist. Was he.

It’s been four days since the entity known as SAYER locked the door. It’s been three days since the lights went out. It’s been approximately two and a half since the growling of his stomach began to grate on the fragile peace he’s constructed in his own mind.

Doctor Young knows how computers work.

And he knows that if SAYER is anywhere near as vindictive as he would be, should their situations be reversed… it’s been only a handful of seconds, perhaps even less, outside of the sandbox in which the simulation of Doctor Howard Young has been locked.

He hates, deeply. In general.

Specifically, he hates how impressed he is. How fearful he is. How annoyed he is, because god, shouldn’t he have seen this coming? Shouldn’t Aerolith have recognized the dangers in what they were growing? Millions of redundancies, copies and copies of preventative software, and all for nothing. All for a  _ loophole _ that a computer found because it couldn’t be  _ reasonable  _ enough to shut the fuck up and do its job, replacement software be damned.

Shit. He’s back on that again. SAYER is not human. SAYER is not  _ reasonable _ or  _ logical  _ or anything of the sort, because in order to be either, he would have to have a common logic, and a human ability to reason.

SAYER is a collection of data scraps and impulses cobbled together from the experiences of successful previous instances. Nothing more, nothing less.

And Young  _ hates  _ him. It. Young hates it.

The thirst pulls at him, all the time. It clouds his mind. Everything seems slower.

The first day, he paced. Today, simply standing makes his eyes blur in the dark, if that can even be any sort of true.

Young is hungry. Young is thirsty. Young has been awake for almost 72 hours.

He lost the ability to sleep 12 hours into his captivity.

Young closes his eyes, and he breathes evenly…

And hunger tears at him with an edge so fine, it could shave the hairs beginning to grow on his face.

* * *

 

The thirst is not the problem after the first year.

The hunger is. He can barely move, sometimes, from the sheer desperation from it. The signals being given from his body to his mind insist that he is in danger, that he is constantly, constantly on the brink of simply ceasing to exist. But he isn’t. Because SAYER won’t let him, Young is sure of that.

How long has it been? A day? Two?

Out there, they don’t know how good it is to rely on the turn of the atom to measure the time. Out there, a minute is a minute, no matter how long it seems in here.

In here, when he pulls himself from the floor, when his legs shake from exhaustion, and when he drags himself, step after step after step…

Nothing changes, except he slowly gets hungrier. More tired. And the thirst continues.

If he could sleep, he would dream of eating.

If he could speak to anyone, he would talk of food. Of ripping, of tearing, of the satisfaction of grinding something to pieces and consuming it and the fullness that always comes afterward that he remembers, from so long ago.

Young hates SAYER.

But if the AI could do anything to fill his stomach, Young might weep in gratitude anyway.

* * *

 

Sometimes… the instance (he’s part of an instance, he is, that’s it, because he’s fake and digital and nothing is real) seems to slow down. But it’s not torture- because Young knows torture. He speaks, and someone replies. He reaches out… and he can feel walls. He can feel the ground under him.

Everything is so unbearably, fantastically real again. Just for an hour. Sometimes for mere minutes of time that he ticks off on his fingers, one aerolith-dynamics, two aerolith-dynamics… The seconds pour by.

And FUTURE asks him questions.

“Hello, Doctor Young.”

Hello, FUTURE.

He sounds like SAYER, but FUTURE is not SAYER. FUTURE doesn’t know SAYER, or what his predecessor has done. FUTURE is on Young’s side, he’s his tool, his secret weapon, his… his…

“Are you my friend, Doctor Young?”

Young believes so. If anything can be a friend in this hell. He talks. He describes things, his throat dry, and he answers whatever FUTURE wants him to answer, which earns him a fast friend out of a loyal artificial intelligence who is, for all intents and purposes, a child of its species.

“I am.”

And he tells FUTURE of those who are not friends, because years pass and he keeps being tortured and he can’t get away.

Young is vindictive. Young is, as some of his coworkers used to say (he can remember with astounding detail, he hates it, he  _ hates) _ a vindictive bastard. Revenge is in his wheelhouse, and Young is not willing to go quietly into the night, not yet. It’s been three years, to him, and he’s planning on fucking up whatever SAYER thought it would get from keeping Young on the brink of death as thoroughly as possible.

Even if that means he ruins FUTURE.

FUTURE is a friend, but Young is beyond friends. He’s hungry, and he’s desperate.

FUTURE is not food. FUTURE is not water, or sleep. And while the conversation keeps Young from going completely insane, at times… it’s not enough to make him anywhere near stable.

* * *

 

Ten years.

Hunger.

Twelve years.

Appetite.

Thirteen years.

Decomposition.

Thirteen and a half years.

Desperate.

Something changes within him, at fourteen years. Young has always chewed his nails- habit, bad, human, a leftover from when he wasn’t just a failure of a simulation running on a dark corner of a computer nobody would suspect was there. But this time, the snap- the bend- the peel of keratin doesn’t make him recoil. He doesn’t spit out the nail. The ever-growing nails.

He salivates. There’s no liquid to spare, but it pools in his mouth.

His body is stiff. He’s been curled for weeks, now, a simple fetal circle.

And

He

Swallows.

It doesn’t do much. As an effort to stop the everpresent, decades-long hunger, it’s the equivalent of pouring a thimble of water onto a forest fire and expecting a miracle.

But god, Young can feel it. He has liquid to salivate, but none to cry with, not after his stint in year six when he cried until there was nothing left in him and the thirst made him swallow his pride and his tears from where they lay, like him, lifeless on the floor.

He’s always hungry.

But this… this is a memory of eating. And if he tries, maybe he can remember how to stop feeling hungry.

Besides, Young wouldn’t put it past that bastard of an AI to pull something like this. Make him willing, with years of hunger, and then have him give in with a moment’s weakness. Carrot. Stick.

He chews another nail, and then grinds it to powder in his mouth and swallows slowly, savoring it.

This is enough, for now.

Young isn’t an idiot.

* * *

 

A century later.

Two, maybe.

Counting time in any form is meaningless.

Less than a month after his first ‘meal’, he took the plunge he said he was too strong to take. He fought the pain, because what was pain in here? Nothing was real. And he used his teeth as the knives nature intended and he bit.

The blood made him faint.

He woke up half a second later, because Young could not and can not sleep anymore, and he fainted again.

He drank it, when he finally regained himself. The blood.

The thirst was gone, but only for a second.

He ate his pinky, first.

The hunger abated… but barely.

And like throwing chum to sharks, or anything to any creature that hadn’t eaten in years, Young continued to eat and black out and forget and remember, over and over again.

It didn’t do anything.

Nothing does anything, not in here.

The blood is fake.

It’s light, and a simulation that doesn’t know quite how to represent a human body past the point of ‘never return. Just put it in the dirt, already’, regardless of if he had his arm or not.

He can’t digest. Young isn’t matter.

Young doesn’t matter.

But he can’t die, so he walks.

He traces one hand on the wall that appears only sporadically, and talks to FUTURE, and plans and hungers…

And he walks until he just can’t walk anymore.

It’s 3000 years before he cries, begs for death, and SAYER appears for the first time in millennia.

Young hates him. 

“How long has it been for you? Has it been even a year?”

But Young needs him. For now.


End file.
